Severe performance regression due to soft particles in 1.5.4

[user21944]

1.5.4 has significantly higher GPU usage than 1.5.3 whenever particles are on screen, going from ~35% to over 80% on my system (Ryzen 5 5600G, Vega 8 iGPU on Windows). This is caused by soft particles, which are now enabled by default.

I'm not sure if the poor performance on my system is a symptom of my hardware or a bug/optimization issue. Regardless, soft particles should probably be disabled by default so that unaware users aren't faced with significant performance degradation after updating (especially on Intel iGPUs where performance is already limited).

No soft particles, 36% usage: No soft particles, capture depth buffer to texture, 40% usage: Soft particles, 80% usage: Performance is the same in both windowed and fullscreen, windowed was used here to take a screenshot